Politics, Religion, Sex and All Those Topics Not Suitable for Dinner Conversation

Category: morality

Ah, Genesis… where it all began. Literally. So much good (or not) stuff here. If nothing else, it is fertile ground for vivid, interesting mental images. Some of those mental images are of massive amounts of death, but yay for creation stories! Creation stories are always interesting, regardless how nonsensical they might be.

The Good

Creation: This is a big one in terms of praiseworthy things. Creating all existence is awesome! Good on ya God! There’s some wrinkles to be ironed out in terms of how and why, but creating everything is definitely a great accomplishment and everything in history depended on it. We can quibble about impressive-good being different than moral-good, but for simplicity sake, I’m counting it.

Other things I marked as “good” was promising never to kill everyone (with a flood) again (9:13-16), and two different instances of blessing Abraham (12:2-3; 17:1-8). The blessings of Abraham were entirely arbitrary on God’s part as far as I can tell, but I think they still count. I’m still not sure if promising not to murder the population in a certain way counts as properly good—one would expect not murdering everything would be the default setting for anyone, let alone a supposedly loving, all-powerful entity—but the pickings were kinda slim.

The Thinker, bronze sculpture by Auguste Rodin. Photo by “Karora,” taken 13 August 2007, released to the public domain. Retrieved from wikimedia commons.

It’s been an odd week so far. Crazy, yet sympathetic, tin-foil hat person on Monday, disturbing dream on Tuesday that kept distracting me, and today… well, today was contemplative. Contemplative is, for me, decidedly in the “good day” category, but that doesn’t make the day a simple one.

Anyway, got to the end of the day and got into a fun conversation with someone. Started off as politics, then migrated to the topic of groups which feel entitled to act against other groups (in this case, we were talking about radical environmental groups who sue the government to enforce their ideals of what use public lands should be put to), and that eventually got us on the topic of religious law versus social or formal law.

Though we never really talked about it in so many words, a good deal of our conversation centered on the concept of objective versus subjective morality. Oddly enough, he from a religious perspective argued the subjective side, while I from the atheistic perspective argued the objective morality side. Stereotypically, that set-up is reversed with the believer arguing for the existence of an objective (god-given) morality and the atheist arguing for a subjective (culturally-based/situationally-based) morality.

It was a very stimulating conversation, however, like so many of the sort, amounted to little more than running on the mental treadmill; energizing and works some muscles, but doesn’t get you anywhere.